Both large and small businesses are equal on the internet.  A search engine only knows what information the website provides to the spider for it to rank the site for the relevance to the search term.  It is a computer after all and follows the age old computing philosophy of “garbage in, garbage out”. So that is why many companies pay search engine optimization experts to fix the “garbage” information that is on the company website. That’s where there can be some differentiation between big money businesses and smaller operations. The big boys probably have someone on staff full time to do nothing but keep up with their web presence. So, how does a small business even the playing field?  Let’s discuss a strategic approach that can get a small business started on an internet marketing plan.

Internet marketing strategy number one is to be very focused with your budget. The internet allows you to hunt with a rifle rather than a shotgun. Internet marketing allows you to advertise to leads that are pre-qualified, have already visited your website, have visited sites related to your industry, or even have been reading articles or blogs about your industry’s products or services. There is no question about it, internet marketing done properly, can be the most efficient use of your marketing budget.

Let’s start with pay-per-click advertising. It is pull marketing at its finest. Regular TV ads or direct mail pieces are pushed to people, most of who have no interest and/or trust in the message. With pay-per-click marketing, computer users pull the ad to themselves, by searching for something in Google, Yahoo or Bing.  Pay-per-click advertising allows you to advertise specifically to people that are searching the internet for terms that you choose to advertise for.  If, for example, you are a small HVAC company, you can advertise specifically for someone searching for air conditioning repairmen in your service area. No wasted ad dollars there! Even better, you don’t pay a penny for the ad to appear on their computer screen when they search, you only pay if they click on your ad and visit your website. Now your marketing budget is going only to pay for people who chose to make contact with your website and no one else. Pay-per-click advertising gets you the most targeted lead you will ever get.

Alright, now we have people coming to your website. So why are the phones not ringing and the contact forms not piling up? Internet marketing strategy number two is conversion architecture. That is just a fancy name for a website that makes the phones ring. There is actually a lot of technical discussion that could be made about conversion architecture, but we will save that for another day. Today, we will boil it down to a few items. Does your website provide the information a web surfer requires, in a quick and visual manner? Does your site navigate easily, load quickly, and lead the user to make contact with your business? Does your website have your phone number prominently displayed in the top right corner of each page? Is your contact form asking for too many required fields to be filled in? Does your website immediately notify you that someone filled out the contact form, so you can reach out to them before they move on to the next business? A properly constructed website keeps your business from wasting your internet marketing budget. Otherwise, you are fishing with no bait.

How do we know the answers to the questions I just posed? Internet marketing strategy number three is Google analytics. As we all know, nothing ever leaves the internet. What happens in Vegas, stays on Facebook, stays on You Tube, and stays on Twitter. With all the information available to everyone, someone needs to dissect it all and analyze the data for you. It’s not about how many hits you had. It’s about the user interaction with your website. Would you like to know how often people return to your site? How many pages of your site get seen the most? From what page do most people leave your site? These and many more questions are answered by Google analytics. Let’s look at that last question as an example. If most people leave your site from the contact form page, that could be a good or bad thing. If the forms are piling up and match up somewhat with the page views, then great, people are finishing the form and they leave because they are done. But, what if the page views and form totals don’t match up much at all? Perhaps your form does not load properly or it asks too many questions. Again, without the data, you will never know.  This is why hiring a good internet marketing consultant can be very valuable to your business. He or she understands this data and can review it for you so you can run your business.

Now, what about display or banner ads, Facebook advertising, remarketing to prior website viewers, social media management, brand reputation management, mobile marketing etc.? Those topics will be covered in upcoming posts, so click the RSS to follow this feed or come back often for more on internet marketing strategies for small businesses. (Especially if you don’t know what an RSS is…).